Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, the spokesman for the Jazz Age, ruled America's decade of prosperity and excess, which began soon after World War 1 and ended around the time of the stock market crash of 1929. The novels and stories for which he is best known examine an entire generation's search for the elusive American Dream of wealth and happiness. Many of his works are derived from his own life and that of his wife and friends. The early gaiety shows only one side of a writer whose second and final decade of work portrayed a life marred by alcoholism and financial difficulties, troubled by lost love, and frustrated by is lack of inspiration.

Fitzgerald was the son of well-to-do Midwestern parents. He was a talented child with an early interest in writing plays and poetry. As a young man, he emulated the rich, youthful and beautiful, a social group with whom he maintained a lifelong love-hate relationship(_______). His first stories appeared in Princeton University's literary magazine, which was edited by his friend and fellow student Edmund Wilson whom Fitzgerald considered his intellectual conscience(_______). Leaving Princeton for the army during World War 1, Fitzgerald spent hi

The rebellious "flaming youth of the new era brought to life in the popular This Side of Paradise, were soon imitated nationwide, with Fitzgerald and his wife serving as models. Zelda signifigantly affected her husband's life and career. During the 1920s she was Fitzgerald's private literary consultant and editor, while publicly she matched Fitzgerald's extravagant tastes and passion in living for the moment(_______). Her gradual deterioration from schizophrenia and eventual breakdown scarred Fitzgerald, contributing to the deep, self-reproaching despair that brought his career to a near standstill in the mid 1930s.

Fitzgerald's work depicts a wise and tragic sense of life. J.F. Powers put it best when he says," There are places enough in his books where he seems to do this beautifully and so it does not sound funny or whimsical when he jots down. 'My sometimes reading my own books for advice. How much I know sometimes - how little at others'" (Powers 184). But the conclusion that Fitzgerald comes to, is that he was finally less wise than tragic (Powers 184). It is probably no possible for a writer to be as wise as he is tragic. Powers points out that, "only saints come that size" (Powers 184).

Many events from Fitzgerald's early life appear in The Great Gatsby, which was published in 1925. Like Fitzgerald, Nick Carraway is a thoughtful young man from Minnesota, educated at an Ivy League school, who moves to New York after the war. Like Fitzgerald, Jay Gatsby is a sensitive young man who idolizes wealth and luxury, and falls in love with a beautiful young woman while stationed at a military camp in the South. Like Nick in The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald again finds this new lifestyle seductive and exciting--he had always idolized the very rich, and now found himself in a decade in which unrestrained materialism set the tone of society, particularly in the large cities of the East. Even so, Fitzgerald saw through the glitter of the Jazz Age to the moral emptiness and hypocrisy beneath--much like Nick--and part of him longed for the moral center absent in his era (Brooks 35). In many ways, The Great Gatsby is Fitzgerald's attemp

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Approximate Word count = 1451
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)